rob mclennan's blog

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Cooler this evening, particularly crossing the
bridges, where the wind picks up and is making a mess of the surface of the
water. People walking, many tonight, and almost in rhythm, as if it were a way
of collectively resisting the wind. I stop and look over the parapet, down onto
the quay, where five pigeons seem to be marching in step in a single, evenly
paced line. I know this is only the projection of a human attachment to order
onto random avian behavior, but still, it’s a remarkably straight line and
remarkably evenly paced.

American poet Cole Swensen’s latest is On Walking On (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017), a book-length suite of poems
engaged in the subject of walking, from her own notes on the subject to her
responses to a lengthy list of other works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Thomas De
Quincey, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval, Guillaime
Apollinaire, John Muir, Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald, Werner Herzog, Harryette
Mullen and Lisa Robertson. The back of the collection includes a healthy bibliography,
which Swensen introduces by writing: “This series hopes to honor the
millennia-old connection between walking and writing without trying to be in
any way definitive. It started with an interest in texts written by a number of
writers about walks that they had taken and then branched out in various
idiosyncratic ways. Idiosyncrasy, in the long run, became the only principle of
both selection and order.”

The
book moves from sections of shorter poems (up to six, but as few as two)
alternating with sections of longer sequences focusing on specific works, from “ROUSSEAU:
THE REVERIES OF A SOLITARY WALKER,” and
“SAND: PROMENADTES AUTOUR D’UN VILLAGE,”
to “SEBALD: THE RINGS OF SATURN” and “ROBERTSON:
‘SEVEN WALKS’,” a sequence echoing Lisa Robertson’s “Seven Walks” from her Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), that includes:

Cole
Swensen:
No, I’ve never thought about it specifically, but in fact I neither take
anything along nor take anything away. My focus is on the rhythmic relationship
between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the
always-changing scene.

But yes, sometimes I do have rules, or rather
constraints. One I’ve been working with lately, for instance—and it only works
in urban spaces—is the single constraint of turning left whenever I encounter
an obstacle, something that makes me stop, such as a traffic light or a T
intersection or crowd congestion. I’ve been doing a series of these walks this
fall, always starting from the same place and always for the same length of
time, to see how differently the walk develops. I end up in very different
places.

Rumpus: This is a fascinating
constraint. Have you ever looked at these walks visually? Drawn them up on a
map to see the shapes?

Swensen: Yes! Exactly! I’m so
glad that comes to mind! I do draw them out on a map, and in that way, the
kinetic experience becomes a visual work, and the perspective that has been
linear and time-based suddenly becomes bird’s-eye-view spatialized. I have also
then retraced the lines on a separate sheet of paper, thus removing the map and
turning the lines into an abstract drawing.

I’ve been in love with the medieval for most of
my life. This definitely has something to do with attending Catholic school—the
art! The syntax of Catholicism, too, led me to studying the medieval. I think
that most people are irrationally attracted to certain historical periods. The
way medieval literature & art employ narrative—fragmented or episodic
narrative, specifically—also the sense of simultaneity, layers of time in the
work—it makes sense to me. On a more personal note, the lives of the saints
were like fairytales for me. I mean, when I was a little Catholic schoolgirl we
learned about all the girl-saints, about Mary—& those stories stuck to me.
My school taught us a great deal about medieval women mystics, about Joan of
Arc, about anchoresses in their cells, & it was very ‘cult of the virgin’
when it came to Mary (at least as far as I remember). Even as a child I think I
understood that those stories all had to do with power, with women’s bodies,
with literacy. I think the nuns taught us about the mystics to counteract
“woman is a temple built over a sewer” & “woman is defective &
misbegotten” & the rest of the church fathers (which I also remember well,
clearly). When I walk into The Cloisters or the Musée de Cluny or the medieval
galleries at any art museum, I want to sit down & think & be quiet. I
feel that way in medieval churches as well—it’s what left of religion for me.

Kempe lived in Norfolk from around 1373 to
1440. After she had given birth to 14 children, she made a vow to live chastely
with her husband, and embarked on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Santiago de
Compostela, Italy and Germany. Her devotion was expressed through loud cries
and roars, which often irritated bystanders, but she became famous as a mystic,
and claimed to have conversations with God.

[...]

Biggs said the memoir, which has just been
digitised by the British Library, was “perhaps the first autobiography written
in English”, and is also “a remarkable record of the religious life of a woman
during the tumultuous 14th and 15th centuries”.

McCarthy,
on her part, cites the 2000 Longman edition as her source for quotations, but
the 1985 Penguin edition, her “undergrad copy,” as her “sentimental source,” writing
out the details of Kempe in a line both straight and slant: “margery kempe invents
the autobi- / ography &vernacular tell-all / the backs of quiet houses from the train / a month
& a half of inconvenient / Sundays [.]” The second (admittedly arbitrary on
my part, given the publication of these two items appear concurrent) collection,
qweyne wifthing, centres itself not
on a singular specific text or individual, but on multiple, citing David Baldwin’s Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower and Linda Simon’s Of virtue rare: Margaret Beaufort, matriarch of the House of Tudor.
She centres the collection instead on multiple Medieval matriarchs, royalty and
sex, as “wifthing” is defined, variously, as sexual intercourse with a woman, an
affair connected with a woman or wife, or, simply, a wedding or coupling. In her
poems, lines and phrases repeat and are reordered, reworked, allowing echoes and
threads to exist throughout; repeating even as the poem progresses, furthers,
further on. The repetition exists almost as a reminder that the stories might
belong to different women of the period, but are far too familiar, and far too
often repeat the same array of mistakes, misfortunes, loves and losses. As McCarthy
writes:

Sunday, February 18, 2018

I’ve
started posting a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors
and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground
press, aiming to appear on the above/ground press blog throughout 2018.